Karen Black (born Karen Blanche Ziegler, July 1, 1939 – August 8, 2013) was an American actress, screenwriter, singer, and songwriter from Illinois. She kicked off her actin’ game in New York City, hittin’ Broadway before landin’ her big film break in Francis Ford Coppola’s “You’re a Big Boy Now” (1966). She kept it rollin’ with roles in “Easy Rider” (1969), “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), and “The Great Gatsby” (1974), snaggin’ Golden Globes for Best Supportin’ Actress for the last two and an Oscar nom for “Five Easy Pieces”.

In 1975, she was in Dan Curtis’s cult horror flicks “Trilogy of Terror” and “Burnt Offerings”, plus Robert Altman’s “Nashville” and “The Day of the Locust”, which got her another Golden Globe nod. Other gigs include “Airport 1975” (1974), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Family Plot” (1976), “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (1982), and Tobe Hooper’s “Invaders from Mars” (1986).

In the ‘90s, she leaned into arthouse and horror flicks, writin’ her own scripts too, before poppin’ up in Rob Zombie’s “House of 1000 Corpses” (2003), which locked in her rep as a cult horror legend. She kept grindin’ in smaller films through the early 2000s and worked as a playwright until she was hit with ampullary cancer in 2010. She passed away from it in Los Angeles in August 2013. With a career spannin’ over 50 years and nearly 200 film credits, Karen Black was an icon.